A puzzle game where you try to break up friendships in a little town. By subtly changing news wrong impressions arise and people slowly drift apart.
About
A game we built as a student team during our education at the HKU. The objective was to explain a current social issue via a game. We were assigned the dreaded Fake News. We were particularly inspired by theories surrounding informational warfare perpetrated by large state-sponsored organisations. That is the to say, the running theory that Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies were trying to influence western media. There were a lot of interesting NATO documents about this that seemed to argue that the main objective here was to cause divisiveness among the western population.
So this is what we tried to emulate with the game. It's about the main character trying to take over his village, but he won't be able to do that when there's a lot of social cohesion. People will just stick up for one another in that case. By spreading rumours (and doing this subtly enough so that people will actually believe you) you can slowly make your neighbours drift apart.
You don't have to make people like you, you just try to make them hate each other even more. You can only take over plots of land that belong to people with little to no social connections. If you take over a plot, everybody starts to dislike you more, so there's this contious raising of the stakes.
The Project
We were mostly super dilligent about properly dividing up the roles, following SCRUM and keeping our Trello board up to date. It was like we were LARPing what it would be like in a large AAA company. It was a very interesting learning experience to see what works in that kind of environment and what doesn't. Because a lot of work was made in the time, but the cohesion of the end product has fallen a bit because of it.
Team
- Jesse van Leeuwen : Programming
- Max Kersten : Programming
- Tim Schipper : Art
- Peter Trapman : Art
- Jasper Oprel : Design
